This year’s International Booker prize shortlisted titles are a diverse bunch, both geographically – from Brazil to Taiwan – and in style, from mainstream blockbuster to experimental jeu d’esprit. As in recent years, independent presses are rewarded for their efforts in promoting translated fiction, providing four of the six titles. And the campaign for proper recognition of translators is finally paying off: for the first time in the prize’s 10-year history, all six books name the translator on the front cover. Here’s our guide to the prospects for each, ahead of the winner announcement on 19 May.
German-Iranian novelist Shida Bazyar reminds us in her novel The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran (Scribe), translated by Ruth Martin, that the people of Iran are the victims of history many times over. The story comes from four members of an Iranian family over 30 years. In 1979, young Behzad greets the Islamic revolution that deposes the Shah, but his hopes for a communist utopia (“a new Cuba”) are thwarted. Instead, he’s surrounded by people who have been waiting for the chance to become bullies all their lives. He and his wife, Nahid, flee to Germany: she takes over the story in 1989, followed by their daughter, Laleh, in 1999.
Laleh visits Iran, amazed by the cultural differences from Germany. What she looks down on, they look up to – “I would never wear gold, no one wears gold, except here” – and also, people in Iran love Ricky Martin unironically. In 2009, Laleh’s brother Mo hears about protests across the Middle East, and his excitement – “As soon as Ahmadinejad is gone, it’ll kick off in Egypt, too [ … ] and eventually all the dictators will be out” – is even more heartbreaking in the context of Iran today. A timely novel doesn’t always deliver – see last year’s Small Boat – but this novel’s depth and empathy would make it a worthy winner any year.
The Witch (Vintage), translated by Jordan Stump, is a deep cut from French novelist Marie NDiaye’s back catalogue – it was first published in 1996. “When my daughters turned 12 I initiated them into the mysterious powers,” it opens, irresistibly. Narrator Lucie has powers of divination and can see people’s futures – and when she does, she cries tears of blood. She dislikes being a witch (“Did I lack the will, the intensity, the rage?”) but still teaches her daughters, as her mother taught her.
Set against this weirdness is a complex comedy of domestic discontent: Lucie’s timeshare-salesman husband runs off with the family money; then she tries to reunite her separated parents (bad news: her father has had a fake tan and dyed his hair). She begins to lose everyone, and her powers are useless to help her; thus the book raises knotty questions about how we make use of our capabilities. This accessible but surprising novel is perfect for newcomers to NDiaye, but the acceleration of events as the story proceeds, and the somewhat arbitrary ending, are frustrating: I don’t expect it to take the prize.
In Brazilian Ana Paula Maia’s previous novel Of Cattle and Men, cows were slaughtered. Now, in On Earth As It Is Beneath (Charco), translated by Padma Viswanathan, it’s the men’s turn. A penal colony for the worst criminals started out with 42 inmates: now there are only three prisoners, as the warden Melquíades – “eaten away by the system he defends” – keeps releasing, hunting and shooting them. Authorities are coming to close the colony down – that is, if those remaining can survive long enough.
In a strange way, this book has classic sitcom elements: people who can’t get along, stuck together and facing one mess after another. The tension between absurdity and grotesque violence gives the book an effervescent energy, and turns it into an existential thriller, all in 100 pages. Confusion reigns, power balances shift, and nobody on the outside cares what happens to the men anyway. As it turns out, this brilliant novel is loosely connected to Of Cattle and Men; you don’t have to read both to get it, but you’ll probably want to. This is an eccentric but very deserving contender.
Perhaps the most formally inventive book on this year’s shortlist is Bulgarian Rene Karabash’s She Who Remains (Peirene), translated by Izidora Angel. It’s narrated by 33-year-old Bekija, a woman in rural Albania, living under archaic traditions. The narrative jumps about, mostly told in a prose poetry without full stops. Details bubble up through repetition: her violent father’s disappointment (“your father wanted a son, but out came you”); how years ago Bekija jilted her fiance, and revenge was exacted by his family; her black-sheep brother Sále’s estrangement; and Bekija’s decision to become a “sworn virgin”, that is, a woman who lives as a man.
There is plenty of powerful eye-catching – and stomach-turning – activity here, as well as a love story hidden rather deep in the backstory, but the book’s eccentric form keeps the reader at a distance, and many elements only come to make sense in retrospect. This may have benefited the novel in the Booker stakes, where the judges reread longlisted titles and gain the benefit of things a first-time reader will miss. Still, this spiky and challenging story looks like a long shot for the prize.
Equally experimental but more playful and approachable is Taiwanese writer Yáng Shuāg-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue (And Other Stories), translated by Lin King. “Hold on. What’s going on here?” it opens, aptly. What’s going on is a novel disguised as a rediscovered travel memoir, complete with multiple afterwords and fictional footnotes alongside the translator’s real ones. It’s set in 1938, where a Japanese-Taiwanese novelist named Aoyama goes on a food tour of Taiwan. (So the book works as a recipe guide too.)
Aoyama has “monster” appetites, which may be concealing something else: she grows fond of her female guide Chi-chan, but struggles to articulate it. “Whenever I start craving something, anything, my stomach burns with this insatiable greed [ …] You’ve been the only one to appease this monster.” But social strictures of gender and class – Chi-chan is a concubine’s daughter – make things harder. At heart this is a simple love story that educates as it entertains, though it takes a long time to get to where it’s going, and the complex structure seems more like window dressing than essential to its ideas. It will charm many readers, but may not be weighty enough to win.
Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director (Riverrun), translated by Ross Benjamin, is the most mainstream novel on the shortlist: a delightful and illuminating chunk of literary fiction that animates the wartime experiences of the German film-maker GW Pabst., “one of the great directors. A master, a legend.” Trapped in Germany when the borders close, Pabst must decide whether he will work for the Nazis if that’s the only way he can get to keep making films.
The book is full of big characters, real and invented – an obsequious antisemitic caretaker; a threatening government minister; Leni Riefenstahl with her “skull-like smile”. Pabst believes “I’m not a political person”, but he must learn that everything is political now. No one can ignore what is happening: not film-makers; not prisoner of war PG Wodehouse, who narrates one chapter; not even humble critics. “Critics? We have no critics! Criticism is a Jewish genre that no one needs.” It is not only its traditional form and direct plot that make The Director stand out on the shortlist, but its range, characterisation, wit and chilling relevance. The International Booker judges have a history of going for smaller-scale titles, but this would be a very popular winner, and a fully deserving one.